Collective leadership unpacked : embracing opportunities, tensions, and complexity

Abstract

Leadership as a one-man-show is an illusion (Jessl and Wilhelm 2023:17ff). Today, leadership as a concept is mostly seen as highly relational, taking place within groups of interacting individuals that operate in larger systems. But for many organisations, this does not mean that formal leadership seizes to exit. It is thus the coexistence and interplay of informal and formal leadership processes that this thesis is interested in. While the division of leaders and followers used to be clearer, we enter a field in which leadership is not attributed to one or a few formally chosen individuals, but where the roles of leaders and followers can change more flexibly. In other words: we enter the world of collective leadership.

This thesis focuses on two different types of collective leadership that are relevant to the work of a specific division of an organisation. These are (1) co-leadership, defined as ‘a leadership couple that operates as a substitute for a single-handed leader’ (Gronn 1999); and (2) shared leadership in teams, considering leadership to be ‘a dynamic, interactive influence process amongst individuals in teams in which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of team goals’ (Pearce 2004). The thesis questions how collective leadership manifest itself in a specific organisational context, which opportunities, and tensions its interplay with hierarchical structures produces, and how it can potentially develop further.

Regarding the case study chosen, findings highlight that while co-leadership is well recognised, leadership and teams are often not thought together. To foster an understanding of leadership as dividable, claimable, and implementable by everyone in a team, a set of measures can be taken. These include a thorough debate on team purpose and mandate; a clear definition of roles and responsibilities in teams; mechanism for decision making and conflict resolution; and a devolution of power to teams, by allowing for a degree of self-determined resources to achieve self-set goals. The thesis underlines that co-leadership and shared leadership in teams are often time intensive, especially in the beginning, as they require more communication, coordinating and negotiation. Yet, the effort may be worthwhile, as the advantages of co-leading dyads and self-leading teams are to react more quickly and diversly to new challenges, to integrate different views, to build on individual strengths, and to act more autonomously, which in turn re- duces the pressure on top leadership.